(statement article by co-curator of the 9th ocat biennale, shenzhen)
Yan Jun
In reply to a spectator’s comment that she herself and her portfolio was “something Fluxus”, A Ke cracked: “Maybe I am Slowcore!” The streamer “Slowcore” is not to wire this section to a historical counterpart, although Fluxus was initiated as a “International Festival of Very New Music”, but rather to revive, again from a musical perspective, a performance space where neither subdisciplining nor intermediality becomes necessary. Since one might raise the comparison between Fluxus and Slowcore, it is fine to stress their shared emphasis on anti-academism, practice of everyday life, deviation from sublimity or perfection, spontaneity, simplicity, and otherwise. For most Chinese artists, I suppose however, Slowcore would be more of a contemporary feedback than a stretch of refrain that echos a certain farback period of art history.
Besides, instead of using the metaphrase for this section’s Chinese title(huanliu) – “soft flow”, we have appropriated “slowcore”, a coinage that refers to a tardy, melancholic musical genre in the 1990s alternative to, and in some sense, revolting against the overheated underground rock of that time. The term has the latter half of “hardcore” hopefully to characterize our collection as “slow, ambiguous but staunch”. And it also strike a claim for delicate mobility in our world that resembles an assembly line incessantly humming clear and intense meanings.
My unfamiliarity with theatre, dance, and performative art necessitates the articulation here specifically on the Chinese music of experimentality (CME).
(· Please note that although the vaguely defined “experimental music” makes a trig association with “experimental film”, “music of experimentality” (shiyanxing de yinyue) is closer to what I’d like to talk about.)
Far from something gently derivative and chronologically successive, the CME is the result of a big bang of “new musics” at the late 1990s. In other words, it has devoured the flight manual over night. The contour of inheritance, divergence, and development is fuzzy and it is still undergoing series of mutative re-invention. Its “history” is a product of desire, a rear-view mirrored indispensability, rather than a fact that embodies one and the only of infinite possibilities. Needless to say, its slack interface with the international experimental music scene is both a cause and an effect of the lack of immediate communication or cooperation. It is also unique in its isolation from the last 30 years of visual arts where a divide between sense and reason, between experience and knowledge, between premodern and contemporary has been so embedded.
The growth of CME over these years has made several trends palpable. The interdisciplining of music, theatre, and performance art, and even some undefinable border zone between performance and frivolity, become well accepted among young artists, no matter he or she is a band member or a non-musician, academically learned or self-educated. It is this hybridity in life and in creative work that helps break the border of fields. And historically, performance art, conceptual art, live concert were fused by a certain aptness of the artists labeled young, or radical, or noncommercial. Naturally, this aptness has been reactivated in the 21st century China. If the transnational dialogues never truly stagnates, today it becomes more subtle-going and exploratory, in which process the performative and conceptual aspects are reinforced so as to, for example, criticize the canonization of avant-garde music and its general tranquilization. These trends might account for the strategically applied convergence or ambiguity in CME.
Questions remain that why some people choose acute, aggressive, and mega volume noise, yet others choose oppressive, boring, radical stone-face performance? Why at a time much political correctness is bestowed by being proletarian, one will compose on the principles of algorithm or hard science experiment and so forth? Why few bands decide to get self-exposed on the stage of The Big Band in Summer, and when fall comes, join a “Musiklos” show? Why folks begin to accept and even feast the sort of unconditioned, unaesthetic, and “everyone can play” music that in one of its most radical forms looks like a bevy camping to kill a single program’s time? Why more and more young artists and players tend to collage noise with performance art and subculture pop in mini activities of recent two or three years?
More pages could be needed to answer above questions and steer them to “instinctive, instant, and maximized responses to reality”. But the best response for me is to confront upcoming questions with the artworks on scene and in this way to pass them on without suiting the audience with any seemingly ultimate reply.
About the artworks. First, all the works presented in this section are time and body based, e. g. musical and acoustic (silent included) performances that at one moment involves some indistinct area, for instance, is collectively gulping swigging or watching sunrise a performance? But it is for certain that every work has its own life story, thus the video recording would be anything but a reproduction. The simultaneity in-between art and the guests’ body is what makes the rendezvous different.
Second, every work is new, whether it is completely invented or reworked on the basis of written text or previous presentation and in the situation of here and now, let alone the cliche that live is always unique. The artists’ works live longer than this Biennale in that they have been launched somewhat earlier than the opening of exhibition and will not finish when the exhibition close and until at some future point in their replay and development. In reference to the artists’ everyday life, the newness here, quite different from that out of historiographic or peer competition, draws its own sap from their animas that are liquid and regenerative.
Third, live, performative art, especially music, could not be finished without collaboration from audience among which there are other artists. This innate sociality is going to be enhanced: the artists, knowing each other or not, have workshopped together before the opening, and this process has influenced their individual creation. As to the audience, instead of being charged with aesthetically hierarchic blessings, they will try to reactivate their own sense and reason through a common set of deskilled methods. This request is not the same with the traditional literati’s preference for refinedness and implication. It is ethical.
Fourth, the invited artists are not established as most of them work flexibly for different art houses, gig spaces, anthrop fields, and commercial agencies, while some do have a job. They are young and obscure artists in close contact with other similarly young and obscure. It is considerably may be that they have not been purified and valorized by the monophonic and virginal discourses of art. It is not an ethical issue but one that in this context you can hardly expect a pure, exchangeable language outside our experiences.
Fifth, it is essential for these artists to bring what they believe in and are eager to reveal rather than to make wow works. Something athletically or intellectually competitive is prohibited in this section. Compared to the aesthetic merits of a work, what is of utmost priority is the possibilities to self renew, the approval of humanity, and such simple facts as “shared time”.
To conclude, I, the alleged curating subject, hope that what I have said will not impact too much upon my colleague artists and the audience. It may be wrong.
In the last few years, it should have been noted, some friends of mine and I used descriptive words such like “non-music”, “unlikely music”, and “not-music” for a wheen of outputs that appeared simple, watery, tedious, and even obdurate, including the kind of “everyone can play”. Is it because of our dislike of the ingrained hierarchy in aesthetics and the lust to nullify human’s capacity to approach the world aesthetically? Or is it an analogy to the promise “everyone can play guitar”, and “everyone as artist” generally? I suggest you to suspend this way of thinking and to sculpt these inquiries with your own sensitive and critical action.
Thanks for your listening.
July 2nd, 2021
(translated by Zhang Kankan)